The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

I finished The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens and Booker Prize Winner in 1970 a few weeks ago. So my post is a bit overdue. Rubens chronicles the Zweck family, a tight-knit and phenomenally dysfunctional family living in London and struggling with a number of past and present family dramas. Rabbi Abraham Zweck is the patriarch and a British immigrant. The story hop-scotches between his perspective, his unmarried daughter Bella's and his drug addicted son Norman. The three main Zwecks slowly peel back the layers of their stormy family history through their musings and recollections.

Abraham's wife was once the glue that anchored the family together with her love of tradition and her command of guilt and need. In fact, Rubens explores that delicate family balance of need, guilt, love and resentment that has fallen so far out of whack for the Zwecks.

Norman, a linguistic genius from an early age and once great lawyer taxes his father and sister heavily with his drug addiction and the hallucinations it brings. Their decision to admit him to a mental hospital acts as a catalyst for all of them emotionally. They each then need to recall the past wrongs and wrong choices of their lives. Rubens unfolds their family story from different perspectives and keeps her reader off balance by revealing new facts and tainting the stories with the different remembrances.

Yet, through it all, she tells mostly the story of family and the need and dependence that family ties create. Father, son, and daughters all responded to mother's need and in their resentment, formed needs and guilt of their own.

I thought it was a masterfully told family drama.